The Open Access (OA) movement has resulted in millions of scholarly papers becoming freely-available to readers around the World. An often overlooked consequence of this phenomenon is the fact that the images included in a journal article generally also fall under the same licenses that dictate the re-use options for the entire publication.

With the increase in open source literature, having a specialized search engine that can help researchers identify needed OA biomedical images can be extremely helpful. The National Library of Medicine has created just that with its Open-i ^® service.

From their website:

“Open-i service of the National Library of Medicine enables search and retrieval of abstracts and images (including charts, graphs, clinical images, etc.) from the open source literature, and biomedical image collections. Searching may be done using text queries as well as query images. Open-i provides access to over 3.7 million images from about 1.2 million PubMed Central^® articles; 7,470 chest x-rays with 3,955 radiology reports; 67,517 images from NLM History of Medicine collection; and 2,064 orthopedic illustrations.”

The available limits that can be applied to refine the search results are quite comprehensive. Limit options include: Article type, Image type/diagnostic imaging modality, Collection/source, License type, Specialty, among other things, and the records can also be field-searched or ranked by research question type (treatment, diagnosis, prognosis, etiology, genetics, etc).

Further reading:

• Demner-Fushman, D., Antani, S., Simpson, M., & Thoma, G. R. (2012). Design and development of a multimodal biomedical information retrieval system. Journal of Computing Science and Engineering, 6(2), 168-177.
• Technical Report (September 2010): Combining Text and Visual Features for Biomedical Information Retrieval

Nature Index is a resource available from Springer Nature (since 2016) that uses data science and bibliometrics to generate indicators and rankings reflecting research output.

From this paper: A guide to the Nature Index. Nature. 2018 Sep;561(7723):S37. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-06628-2. PubMed PMID: 30232441.

“The Nature Index is a database of author affiliations and institutional relation­ships. The index tracks contributions to research articles published in 82 high-quality natural science journals, chosen by an inde­pendent group of researchers.

The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of publication productivity at the institutional and national level and, as such, is an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration. Data in the Nature Index are updated regularly, with the most recent 12 months made avail­able under a Creative Commons licence at natureindex.com. The database is compiled by Springer Nature.”

According to the publisher, the list of included journals (revised in June 2018) was generated by a ”global survey of the wider research community” and via a multidisciplinary panel of researchers who were asked to name the journals that they would most like to publish their best work in, without considering impact factor. (In a way, this concept is not too different from having a stock market index act like a benchmark or indicator of the performance of broader markets.)

Users can view an institution’s individual profile (for example, MSKCC’s profile) that includes information about research output, collaborations and relationships. Also available are supplements based on in-house analyses of the Nature Index data, for example, the Nature Index 2018 Rising Stars supplement recently released in September 2018. These supplements include a variety of interesting Tables, for example, one from this latest supplement focusses on “rising” institutions. Furthermore, on their main website a permanent menu option leads to various annual tables (going back to 2016), for example, ones listing the top healthcare institutions for specified years.

Thanks to Nature Index’s Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) which allows for the most recent 12 months of data to be freely re-used by others, individuals may register with natureindex.com to create customized tables around their own interests.  In fact, it appears that the data has already been used by researchers, for example, to carry out the work reported on in this published study on “Gender disparities in high-quality research revealed by Nature Index journals”, see:

Bendels MHK, Müller R, Brueggmann D, Groneberg DA. Gender disparities in high-quality research revealed by Nature Index journals. PLoS One. 2018 Jan 2;13(1):e0189136. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189136. eCollection 2018. PubMed PMID: 29293499; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5749692.

Fell free to contact the MSK Library with any questions about this or any other information resources.

BMJ Best Practice, a tool that “supports decision making at the point of care” and can be accessed via the MSK Library’s A-Z list of Databases, has replaced BMJ Clinical Evidence.

BMJ Clinical Evidence is now discontinued, however, starting in June 2018, the complete archive of the BMJ Clinical Evidence content can be searched via the PubMed database and is available in free full-text via PubMed Central (PMC). The PDF articles available via PMC are exactly the same as those that could be obtained previously from BMJ Clinical Evidence. For an example, see:

Pay A. Malignant melanoma (non-metastatic): sentinel lymph node biopsy. BMJ Clin Evid. 2016 Jan 19;2016. pii: 1705. Review. PubMed PMID: 26788739; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4720216.

On the BMJ Best Practice website, the publisher explains the change: Continue reading →